Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán said he is backing President Donald Trump because he is “the only one” who can get the American economy back up and running after the coronavirus pandemic.
Speaking at a meeting of Visegrád Four (Hungary, Poland, Czechia, and Slovakia) leaders in Warsaw, the national conservative leader said that, with the threat of the Chinese virus beginning to subside, national leaders are now ” facing the second battle: the one to safeguard jobs and to launch economic growth.”
In a transcript of a speech seen by Breitbart London, Prime Minister Orbán said that the national conservative-leaning, broadly anti-mass migration governments of the Visegrád had “all handled the pandemic excellently” and were relatively well-placed for an economic fightback as, among other things, they had kept a grip on their state debt.
However, he further explained that Europe’s economic issues are complicated by the fact that “there are countries in the EU that are unable to keep their state debt under control, and are mired in debt” — and, as EU member-states tied to the European System of Central Banks themselves, the Visegrád are to some extent bound to the fate of the bloc’s less responsible, more left-liberal governments.
Orbán said there would likely have to be some concessions to the EU’s ruling technocrats on the question of pooling debts, but that the measures would have to reasonable — and that Hungary and the rest of the Visegrád would be looking to Poland’s Mateusz Morawiecki, of the Law and Justice Party (PiS), to protect their little bloc’s interests.
“This is also why I personally support President Trump in America; because he is the only one I see as being able to put the American economy on track after the pandemic. So these are just the sort of leaders we need right now,” he added, seeing in the U.S. leader a person with similar priorities on not just economics but perennial issues such as mass migration.
Orbán suggested that the Visegrád would be pressing the EU to provide them with guarantees on the latter in exchange for its agreement to a common pandemic recovery plan, not least because, as countries at or near the EU’s common external borders, “we see what’s happening, and we see migration pressure intensifying day by day.”
“We need to catch an increasing number of illegal people smugglers at our border fences. The number of illegal entry attempts is growing day by day, and the incidence of epidemic disease on the migration route is also continuously increasing,” he warned.
Indeed, the Islamist government of Turkey, which was deliberately transporting illegal migrants to its EU border with Turkey and actively assisting them to cross before the coronavirus pandemic took hold in earnest, has suggested that it will reopen “the gates” once the virus threat has subsided — suggesting the migrant crisis has not been ended but merely paused, ready to recommence when the West may be at its most economically vulnerable.